


The Dragon's Roar

by mindbending



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: ...as well as zuko's insecurities, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Getting Together, M/M, Music, but every identity crisis manifests as a new and concerning type of operatic technique, canon-typical child abuse, chapter 1 stars zuko’s insecurities, chapter 2 stars ZUKKA, concept: zuko is a naturally gifted singer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25054234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindbending/pseuds/mindbending
Summary: Sokka starts whistling while they're in the war balloon. Though unfamiliar, his song is lovely and simple, and the melody steals into Zuko's heart.After years of self-imposed silence, Zuko dares to hum along.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Ozai & Zuko (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 216
Kudos: 2342
Collections: My Favorite Atla Fics, best of avatar, zuko best boi





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The fandom has agreed that Zuko is a theater kid, but what if he's a _musical_ theater kid?

When Zuko is six, he has no fire.

His sister set her nursery aflame at age two. At four, she escapes her nurses and goes sprinting through the palace, flinging open doors at random and terrorizing the other servants. But even before she crashes inside a room, the guttering of flames heralds her approach.

Sometimes she pulls him from his room to eavesdrop, crawling through vents and under tables, and so he hears his father speaking with Azula’s firebending tutor.

Speaking about _him._

“My son is _late,”_ Ozai hisses, all the flames in the room flaring at that last word. “He must begin extra training now, even before his fire comes. Otherwise he’ll spend his entire life behind.”

“What if the fire never comes?” the tutor ventures.

“Then,” comes the reply, “he is no son of mine.”

/

When Zuko is six, his mother wakes him too early for a music lesson.

His firebending, when it comes (and it must), will draw not on the strength of his limbs but on his _self._ It will flow from his breath, his soul’s energy channeled into heat all around him. The birth of fire, she explains, is always air. 

Since he has no fire yet, he must train his breath another way. 

It’s why at sunrise he stumbles into the palace’s own theater, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes. A music tutor waits onstage with a stringed pipa laid beside her.

She’s been ordered to teach him the tsungi horn, she tells him. His uncle learned it before him along with many other great firebenders of history, because playing the horn disciplines the breath. It will teach him to breathe, she promises, and show him how to channel his soul’s energy into music, how to manifest it as sound ringing all around them.

He tries, but at six he is too weak to carry a tsungi horn and too fragile to properly blow it. After two failed lessons (and, he suspects, a session of pleading with his father), his teacher lets him put the horn aside for a few years. 

For now, he’ll just learn to sing.

/

At first, Zuko doesn’t make a peep. The hall is large and terrifying, with rows of seats usually filled by all the grandest dignitaries of his country, with a royal box looming high above where his father sits at each show. And though all the seats are empty, he is six and too terrified to breathe.

When his teacher lets him turn around and face the stage backdrop instead, he graduates to whispering. She plucks out simple folk songs on her pipa, and he warbles them back. He sings like he’s sighing, with barely any sound besides his own weighty exhale. He runs out of breath over and over, gasping for more air every few words.

_Winter, spring, summer, fall..._

(Though he always remembers the words and melodies, hitting each pitch with unerring accuracy, his teacher frowns when he’s not looking. He’s only six, yet somehow he makes every song sound sad.)

/

“You have to breathe forcefully,” his music teacher insists every day. “That means expanding your lungs, loosening all your muscles, filling up every bit of space with air. This deep breathing is the first step for good music...and for firebending.”

It’s the first step for firebending, and Zuko can’t get it. His fire’s at last arrived, a candle flame that dances bright on his fingertips before inevitably burning out, and every day his firebending master fumes for precisely the same reason. Both his teachers insist he has to breathe _hard,_ forcibly grabbing the air, devouring it and keeping it for himself until his ribs are ready to burst. 

But reckless expansion feels _wrong._ He tries, and every time he runs out of breath too quickly, as if it’s all a lie. Traitorously, he thinks that this so-called “deep breath” is really exceptionally shallow. 

He teaches himself backwards without telling them. He purposefully _tightens_ something deep in his belly, calling up some unnamed resolve in his core, and when he breathes he pushes _against_ himself. It’s a hit-or-miss approach; sometimes the tension creeps up into his throat and suffocates him. But when it works, he finds power in his restraint, in the way he takes just as much air as he needs and resists the temptation of greed. He finds strength in his own, self-imposed balance.

It’s his first step towards ruling, though none of them know it yet.

/

Slowly, Zuko’s voice emerges like a turtleduckling from its shell. At age eight it’s a fragile, reedy sound, but as he learns to sustain it with air it floats sweetly. Once he grows more confident, he dares to sing outside the theater, practicing his favorite songs in his room.

Azula eavesdrops. Then she compliments his perfect impression of a choking iguana seal.

/

In the early morning hours, Zuko stands onstage, facing the backdrop, and sings. His mother stays for some of his lessons and praises him each time. His father inquires regularly into his children’s progress in every other subject, but he never acknowledges that his son is a musician.

Azula’s fire is a work of art in its own right. Her hands slice through the air, emitting wave after wave of searing flame, silent and effortless.

Working beside her under the blazing afternoon sun, Zuko fails. He fails and he falls and he thrusts himself up again, yet no matter how hard he punches or how long he rehearses his forms, his fire flings out a few sparks and then wisps to smoke, useless.

He falls and closes his eyes, wondering for just a moment what it might be like to give up. The world is a comforting black, and all around him he can hear the hollering and cheers of genuinely _talented_ firebenders.

He pushes himself back up and tries a new approach.

_“Agh!”_

The next time he tries to hurl fire, he punctuates the movement with a grunt, a stab of breath, a quick pulse from his core. A fireball leaps from his fingers, a perfect flaming sphere.

He clings to the rhythm of his forms like the beat of a song, and the next time he kicks outwards, he keeps the motion long and fluid and lets out a howl. A thin sheet of fire fans outwards, sustained by his breath.

He can never acknowledge it, not to his father, but his firebending is just another form of music.

/

Zuko tests the limits of his voice. He stretches his mouth wide in both directions, spreading his lips to let out as much sound as he can. He still can’t face the theater seats, but he suspects if he did, you could hear him even from the royal box.

He turns around after one lesson and finds Uncle Iroh listening with his mother.

“By nature your voice is lovely, Prince Zuko,” his uncle tells him in his lilting cadence. “The sound is delicate as an erhu violin. But-” he takes a sip of tea- “you need not work so hard to announce its greatness. Keep the shape of your lips small and humble, even while you let the space _within you_ stretch wide as the open sky.”

Zuko has no idea what he’s talking about.

/

He grows. By age twelve he can call up his fire reliably, and the basics of firebending settle into his muscles like a particularly memorable melody. His voice swells, growing deep and expansive and _rich,_ ringing through the metal palace _._

By age twelve, the fault lines in his life turn painfully obvious. His father wishes he were dead. His sister’s talent explodes and Zuko will never catch up; she’ll outmatch Fire Lord Azulon himself within a few years. And Zuko’s voice matures but not fast enough, and it hangs in an in-between awkward stage, regularly springing loud _cracks_ on him and his poor listeners. He pushes past the cracks, trying the same phrases again and again.

Azula doesn’t have to eavesdrop this time, not with the way his voice carries.

“Zuzu? You’re probably going for a dragon’s roar,” she says, poking her head into his room with a saccharine smile. “So I _have_ to let you know you sound like a badgerfrog _croaking.”_

“I do not.”

“A badgerfrog croaking _as it dies from throat cancer.”_

“Azula!”

/

Zuko’s voice changes, but he’s late, he’s always running late. His tutor assures that with time he’ll develop a natural vibrato, the well-balanced vibration that comes with maturity and freedom and true knowledge of one’s voice, but it doesn’t show up fast enough. One night he tries to steal his vibrato early, trilling as fast as he can, imposing an out-of-place tremor on his notes.

He means to sound older. But Azula’s mockery echoes in his head though she’s not literally around, laughing that he sounds like a squalling baby. 

He gives up when his voice turns sore in protest.

/

Zuko listens to his father.

He’s always listened carefully to what his father has to say (perhaps too much, the words curling into his lungs like smoke and dripping slow poison), but now Zuko focuses on _how_ he says it. Sometimes Ozai spits his words with brutal enunciation. Sometimes he growls, dipping into sinister depths. Like fire, his voice is bright and brazen and dangerous. In every sentence hides an implicit threat.

Zuko listens to his father and tries to remake his own voice in Ozai’s style. He chops off the higher notes that once floated so easily to him. He sets aside the sweetness of his tone, renders it off-limits behind a wall, and chases something darker, deeper. He pushes out low notes, purposefully laden with weight. He thrusts forth his voice like it’s a club to be forced past enemy shields, he spits out his words, he works every syllable over with his throat and tongue and jaw.

(Zuko ends every lesson in pain, his voice throbbing and scratchy and worn-out. He doesn’t admit that to anyone.)

(He doesn’t sing for pleasure anymore.)

/

When Uncle Iroh returns from Ba Sing Se, he slips into one of Zuko’s lessons.

“I can hardly hear your old sweetness anymore,” he remarks. “Already, you sound like a grown man.”

“Thank you,” Zuko says proudly.

When he spies tears glinting in his uncle’s eyes, Zuko attributes them entirely to Lu Ten.

/

After the Agni Kai, Zuko loses his voice screaming.


	2. Chapter 2

In the enforced quiet that follows, as Zuko marches onto his ship with a fool’s errand and a fool’s brand on his face, he silently gives up singing. The _Wani_ is a tiny bucket made entirely of metal, where footsteps echo and notes surely would too, so Zuko can’t have music here. It’s fine, because he doesn’t _deserve_ music.

His breathing goes to hell and takes his bending with it. Stress constricts his muscles, and no matter how he gasps, every breath is insufficient, stuck in his throat and the shallows of his chest. He’s lost access to his core. When he firebends his uncle pleads with him to rely on his root, but he has no _root_ to speak of. He’s an exile, swaying with each rock of the boat as he gets his sea legs, rootless in every sense of the word.

The closest he gets to music now is shouting, so he shouts himself raw _,_ cursing and yelling and crying out as his uncle drags him once more through a basic firebending drill.

It’s a solo act. Sure, his sailors stand where they’re supposed to and duck when the drill commands, but really it all comes down to him, and all eyes are on him as his fire fails all the damn time.

(He’s lonely, all the time.)

/

Zuko stumbles into a duel.

(A duet.)

In the dead of winter he catches sight of what may or may not but had better be the Avatar, and he directs his ship to crash into a Southern Water Tribe village, and as he marches down the gangplank some kid in theatrical face paint sprints up at him, hollering in his face.

Zuko rids himself of the kid with two high kicks to the head.

Striding into the center of the village, Zuko begins his oration. He speaks clearly, loudly, throwing fire with a forceful yell. He demands that they surrender the Avatar-

Until the kid lunges at him in a sneak attack. 

(It might’ve worked, if he hadn’t announced said sneak attack by yelling at the top of his lungs.)

They dance around each other. Zuko yells with effort. The kid yells in sheer panic and rolls out of the way and throws some misshapen weapon Zuko can’t identify. Zuko dodges with a grunt and then rests, he waits for his opponent to take up the melody once more, and the kid lunges with a spear that Zuko snaps three times, each beat crisp and clear. He takes the shaft and slams the kid’s head three times again, an improvised refrain. 

He falls, and Zuko feels strangely bereft, like when a song ends too early with a chord unresolved.

_Clang!_

The misshapen weapon- a boomerang- loops back and smacks Zuko’s helmet, the perfect stinger note to end their duel. As the world spins and Zuko tries not to drop dead from a concussion, he notes that their timing couldn’t have been better if they’d rehearsed it.

/

Zuko’s life goes off-key after that.

He finds and promptly loses the Avatar, and he loses and finds his uncle, and he gets beaten up by a group of elegantly dressed women- one of whom looks suspiciously like the kid from the South Pole under the make-up, though maybe that’s a concussion-induced daydream. A couple weeks later he’s allied with pirates, and the noisy kid from the South Pole _definitely_ shows up again and somehow turns the pirates against him with a single loudmouth speech _,_ and by the time Zuko’s wearing an old theater mask and rescuing the Avatar from Zhao, he’s really given up on keeping track.

There’s one constant- he won’t let himself have music. He can’t, no matter how often the old Fire Nation folk melodies steal into his head and refuse to leave, no matter how many times Uncle Iroh tries to wheedle him into playing the tsungi horn for the _Wani’s_ talent night.

/

Zuko’s back in the palace.

His father has welcomed him back, and so Zuko sits at the Fire Lord’s side. In every meeting, he keeps carefully silent. Whenever he feels the urge to speak, he bites his tongue and swallows down the sound.

He has too much to say. There’s screaming coiled inside him, a raw howl at a world that’s wronged him.

(At himself.)

The sound and his fury will choke him if they aren’t exorcised. It’s why he seeks out an empty corner in the palace, why he finds an unused closet and systematically fills it with his childhood clothes, heavy fabrics to dampen the sound. It’s why he steps inside and shuts the door tight and raises a scarf to his lips. Thoroughly muffled, he opens his mouth and lets out one note.

Though the air takes some coaxing, the note comes in time, deep yet surprisingly mellow.

He thought he might have lost his voice forever, but the music flows back to him with shocking ease. He gives up (some of) the pretenses of his youth, the artificial limits, the desperation to sound like his father. He blends high and low, warmth and power and clarity all rushing together.

When he sings, the constant background unease goes quiet in his head, and Zuko can think about his place in the universe.

He thinks of his uncle, and the pretense of goodness he himself had tasted in Ba Sing Se. He meditates on the dissonance churning in his belly, the certainty that he’s lost his way, that this deferent, silent prince he plays isn’t _him._

Through meditation he steadies his breath enough to try a long note. At first he nearly captures it out of habit, strangling the sound in his throat. But when he taps into some new well of courage and lets it go free, it spins a natural vibrato, light and all his own.

/

He sets out to find the Avatar. It’s a familiar refrain, but this time he’s aiming for a different ending.

/

With the Avatar at his side, Zuko approaches the Sun Warriors. He feels fire pulse with a heartbeat. He hears the roar of dragons. He learns of firebending in its truest form.

And no matter how much he protests to boomerang-kid (who’s named Sokka and is now somehow an _ally he lives with),_ Zuko isn’t surprised that firebending first came from dance.

/

Somehow, he winds up alone with Sokka in a war balloon, on the way to staging a massively risky and illegal jailbreak. As they float through the clouds (and seriously, Zuko’s had months to prepare for this, can’t he manage anything more profound than “yeah, fluffy”?), Sokka starts whistling.

On instinct, Zuko wheels around and barks, _“What?”_

He just stares back. “What?”

Sokka picks up the tune again a few minutes later, repeating it over and over. Zuko doesn’t know the song; it might be from the South Pole. It’s lovely and simple, and as they waft through the fluffy clouds, the melody steals into Zuko’s heart.

A good breath is a work of art. It’s a surge of feeling so pure that the next note or flame has no choice but to soar, and as Zuko hears Sokka whistle and surveys the open sky, he feels impossibly, gloriously full of air. He tries to keep silent, he knows Sokka wouldn’t want him interrupting, yet he can’t help but join in.

So he starts humming a third higher in harmony, and Sokka shoots a dazzling smile at him before resuming his whistling, and they fall back into their duet.

/

Somehow, the war ends. Zuko stands before citizens of every nation, his voice resounding through the palace square as he swears by peace and harmony.

“Did you know,” his uncle says, eyes on the golden emblem now nestled in Zuko’s top-knot, “that our symbol is not only a flame?”

“It isn’t?”

“It is that, of course,” he muses. “But it has a double meaning. It is also the shape of an ancient tsungi horn.”

He rests his hand on Zuko’s cheek, and it’s all either can do not to cry.

/

Zuko escapes the palace. Not often, he treats his work seriously and there’s more work than he can complete in a lifetime, but sometimes he lets the old gang coax him to the _Jasmine Dragon_ or on some other ill-advised adventure. Via blackmail they drag him back to Ember Island’s theater, where the new autumn play is thankfully fictional.

(This time Aang tries to steal Sokka’s place, since the lady in front of his seat’s too tall for him to see. Curled next to Zuko, Sokka refuses to budge.)

The story’s better this time, but it’s punctuated by musical numbers, and Zuko can’t stand it. The lead soprano’s straining, and the baritones are mumbling without a hint of support, and Zuko mumbles his protests through the entire play.

“You’re just jealous because you can’t sing like that,” Toph laughs.

“I sure hope not!”

It escalates into a _thing_. As they gather around the campfire that night, Zuko launches one well-reasoned technical critique after another. Almost everyone else counterattacks, but not by addressing any of his specific complaints. They just throw blanket insults, insisting that he’s got no musical sensitivity at all. Toph nearly challenges Zuko to a bending brawl over the soprano’s honor until Sokka- either sleep-deprived and losing his wits, or sleep-deprived and soaring towards unprecedented brilliance- intervenes and distracts them all.

By announcing that Zuko’s surprisingly gorgeous by firelight.

And that he’d like to see how Zuko looks in no light.

Say, in the beach house’s master bedroom.

/

Sokka leans in a bedroom doorway. Zuko’s hunched over in his palace study just outside, reviewing his morning letters.

“Did you know music once saved my life?”

Zuko glances up from his letters. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Sokka snorts. “I got trapped inside a mountain. Had to sing so badgermoles would help me out.”

A peculiar look flits across Zuko’s face. “Music’s more powerful than people think.”

“You’re _really_ into music, aren’t you?” Sokka ventures, hesitant.

Zuko pauses. Lifts an eyebrow. “What makes you say that?”

“Your uncle? Toph might’ve made a joke about me ‘getting lucky’-” he winces, and Zuko flushes bright red to match his robes- “and he said the real luck would be if I ever got to hear you play the horn...or sing.”

Zuko swallows hard.

“And you don’t have to. Obviously. Same rules here as always, no doing anything you really hate doing and definitely not for _my_ sake, but...if you wanna, I’d love to hear.”

At first, Zuko can only stare.

Then he rises from his seat. For a moment, he sways, rolling his shoulders and neck, letting go of needless stress. Regardless, an old anxiety nags at him. Besides his mother and uncle and his tutor, he’s never intentionally sung for anyone. The royal quarters he now occupies are spacious, with airy vaulted ceilings, and while that bodes well for the acoustics, it means the sound will carry.

He straightens up and rests his eyes on Sokka, who looks back with curiosity and a gentleness that Zuko still can’t believe is for _him._

Zuko breathes.

_Winter, spring, summer and fall._

His voice rolls through the room and spills into the hallway, bright and golden and _happy._

_Four seasons, four loves._

He sweeps low and high, the notes impeccably precise but for the slight waver of an unbound vibrato. Though the shape of his lips stays small and modest, he feels a space wide as an open sky within him, and his phrases flow outwards without pauses or cracks, unbroken. Sokka’s jaw drops in awe.

_Four seasons, for love._

Zuko doesn’t once flinch, instead drawing a new strength from Sokka’s gaze. When he finishes, “love” echoes through the palace like the roar of a dragon.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Kudos and comments are much appreciated <3


End file.
